This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

Xen dom0 in FreeBSD 11-CURRENT

• FreeBSD has just gotten dom0 support for the Xen hypervisor, something NetBSD has had for a while now
• The ports tree will now have a Xen kernel and toolstack, meaning that they can be updated much more rapidly than if they were part of base
• It's currently limited to Intel boxes with EPT and a working IOMMU, running a recent version of the -CURRENT branch, but we'll likely see it when 11.0 comes out
• How will this affect interest in Bhyve? ***

A tale of two educational moments

• Here we have a blog post from an OpenBSD developer about some experiences he had helping people get involved with the project
• It's split into two stories: one that could've gone better, and one that went really well
• For the first one, he found that someone was trying to modify a package from their ports tree to have fewer dependencies
• Experience really showed its worth, and he was able to write a quick patch to do exactly what the other person had been working on for a few hours - but wasn't so encouraging about getting it committed
• In the second story, he discussed updating a different port with a user of a forum, and ended up improving the new user's workflow considerably with just a few tips
• The lesson to take away from this is that we can all help out to encourage and assist new users - everyone was a newbie once ***

What's coming in NetBSD 7

• We first mentioned NetBSD 7.0 on the show in July of 2014, but it still hasn't been released and there hasn't been much public info about it
• This blog post outlines some of the bigger features that we can expect to see when it actually does come out
• Their total platform count is now over 70, so you'd be hard-pressed to find something that it doesn't run on
• There have been a lot of improvements in the graphics area, particularly with DRM/KMS, including Intel Haswell and Nouveau (for nVidia cards)
• Many ARM boards now have full SMP support
• Clang has also finally made its way into the base system, something we're glad to see, and it should be able to build the base OS on i386, AMD64 and ARM - other architectures are still a WIP
• In the crypto department: their PNRG has switched from the broken RC4 to the more modern ChaCha20, OpenSSL has been updated in base and LibreSSL is in pkgsrc
• NetBSD's in-house firewall, npf, has gotten major improvements since its initial debut in NetBSD 6.0
• Looking to the future, NetBSD hopes to integrate a stable ZFS implementation later on ***

OpenZFS office hours

• We mentioned a couple weeks back that the OpenZFS office hours series was starting back up
• They've just uploaded the recording of their most recent freeform discussion, with Justin Gibbs being the main presenter
• In it, they cover how Justin got into ZFS, running in virtualized environments, getting patches into the different projects, getting more people involved, reviewing code, spinning disks vs SSDs, defragging, speeding up resilvering, zfsd and much more ***

Interview - Baptiste Daroussin - bapt@freebsd.org

Packaging the FreeBSD base system with pkgng

Discussion

Packaging the FreeBSD base system with pkgng (follow-up)

Feedback/Questions

• Jeff writes in
• Anonymous writes in
• Alex writes in
• Joris writes in ***

Mailing List Gold

• ok feedback@ ***

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

EuroBSDCon 2014 talks and tutorials

• The 2014 EuroBSDCon videos have been online for over a month, but unannounced - keep in mind these links may be temporary (but we'll mention their new location in a future show and fix the show notes if that's the case) <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• Arun Thomas, BSD ARM Kernel Internals <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• Ted Unangst, Developing Software in a Hostile Environment <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• Martin Pieuchot, Taming OpenBSD Network Stack Dragons <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• Henning Brauer, OpenBGPD turns 10 years <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• Claudio Jeker, vscsi and iscsid iSCSI initiator the OpenBSD way <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• Paul Irofti, Making OpenBSD Useful on the Octeon Network Gear <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• Baptiste Daroussin, Cross Building the FreeBSD ports tree <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• Boris Astardzhiev, Smartcom’s control plane software, a customized version of FreeBSD <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• Michał Dubiel, OpenStack and OpenContrail for FreeBSD platform <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• Martin Husemann & Joerg Sonnenberger, Tool-chaining the Hydra, the ongoing quest for modern toolchains in NetBSD <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• Taylor R Campbell, The entropic principle: /dev/u?random and NetBSD <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• Dag-Erling Smørgrav, Securing sensitive & restricted data <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• Peter Hansteen, Building The Network You Need With PF <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• Stefan Sperling, Subversion for FreeBSD developers <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• Peter Hansteen, Transition to OpenBSD 5.6 <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• Ingo Schwarze, Let’s make manuals more useful <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• Francois Tigeot, Improving DragonFly’s performance with PostgreSQL <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• Justin Cormack, Running Applications on the NetBSD Rump Kernel <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• Pierre Pronchery, EdgeBSD, a year later <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• Peter Hessler, Using routing domains or tables in a production network <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• Sean Bruno, QEMU user mode on FreeBSD <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• Kristaps Dzonsons, Bugs Ex Ante <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• Yann Sionneau, Porting NetBSD to the LatticeMico32 open source CPU <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• Alexander Nasonov, JIT Code Generator for NetBSD <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• Masao Uebayashi, Porting Valgrind to NetBSD and OpenBSD <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• Marc Espie, parallel make, working with legacy code <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• Francois Tigeot, Porting the drm-kms graphic drivers to DragonFly <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• The following talks (from the Vitosha track room) are all currently missing:
• Jordan Hubbard, FreeBSD, Looking forward to another 10 years (but we have another recording)
• Theo de Raadt, Randomness, how arc4random has grown since 1998 (but we have another recording)
• Kris Moore, Snapshots, Replication, and Boot-Environments
• Kirk McKusick, An Introduction to the Implementation of ZFS
• John-Mark Gurney, Optimizing GELI Performance
• Emmanuel Dreyfus, FUSE and beyond, bridging filesystems
• Lourival Vieira Neto, NPF scripting with Lua
• Andy Tanenbaum, A Reimplementation of NetBSD Based on a Microkernel
• Stefano Garzarella, Software segmentation offloading for FreeBSD
• Ted Unangst, LibreSSL
• Shawn Webb, Introducing ASLR In FreeBSD
• Ed Maste, The LLDB Debugger in FreeBSD
• Philip Guenther, Secure lazy binding ***

OpenBSD adopts SipHash

• Even more DJB crypto somehow finds its way into OpenBSD's base system
• This time it's SipHash, a family of pseudorandom functions that's resistant to hash bucket flooding attacks while still providing good performance
• After an initial import and some clever early usage, a few developers agreed that it would be better to use it in a lot more places
• It will now be used in the filesystem, and the plan is to utilize it to protect all kernel hash functions
• Some other places that Bernstein's work can be found in OpenBSD include the ChaCha20-Poly1305 authenticated stream cipher and Curve25519 KEX used in SSH, ChaCha20 used in the RNG, and Ed25519 keys used in signify and SSH ***

FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE

• FreeBSD's release engineering team likes to troll us by uploading new versions just a few hours after we finish recording an episode
• The first maintenance update for the 10.x branch is out, improving upon a lot of things found in 10.0-RELEASE
• The vt driver was merged from -CURRENT and can now be enabled with a loader.conf switch (and can even be used on a PlayStation 3)
• Bhyve has gotten quite a lot of fixes and improvements from its initial debut in 10.0, including boot support for ZFS
• Lots of new ARM hardware is supported now, including SMP support for most of them
• A new kernel selection menu was added to the loader, so you can switch between newer and older kernels at boot time
• 10.1 is the first to support UEFI booting on amd64, which also has serial console support now
• Lots of third party software (OpenSSH, OpenSSL, Unbound..) and drivers have gotten updates to newer versions
• It's a worthy update from 10.0, or a good time to try the 10.x branch if you were avoiding the first .0 release, so grab an ISO or upgrade today
• Check the detailed release notes for more information on all the changes
• Also take a look at some of the known problems to see if you'll be affected by any of them
• PC-BSD was also updated accordingly with some of their own unique features and changes ***

arc4random - Randomization for All Occasions

• Theo de Raadt gave an updated version of his EuroBSDCon presentation at Hackfest 2014 in Quebec
• The presentation is mainly about OpenBSD's arc4random function, and outlines the overall poor state of randomization in the 90s and how it has evolved in OpenBSD over time
• It begins with some interesting history on OpenBSD and how it became a security-focused OS - in 1996, their syslogd got broken into and "suddenly we became interested in security"
• The talk also touches on how low-level changes can shake up the software ecosystem and third party packages that everyone uses
• There's some funny history on the name of the function (being called arc4random despite not using RC4 anymore) and an overall status update on various platforms' usage of it
• Very detailed and informative presentation, and the slides can be found here
• A great quote from the beginning: "We consider ourselves a community of (probably rather strange) people who work on software specifically for the purpose of trying to make it better. We take a 'whole-systems' approach: trying to change everything in the ecosystem that's under our control, trying to see if we can make it better. We gain a lot of strength by being able to throw backwards compatibility out the window. So that means that we're able to do research and the minute that we decide that something isn't right, we'll design an alternative for it and push it in. And if it ends up breaking everybody's machines from the previous stage to the next stage, that's fine because we'll end up in a happier place." ***

Interview - Justin Cormack - justin@netbsd.org / @justincormack

NetBSD on Xen, rump kernels, various topics

News Roundup

The FreeBSD foundation's biggest donation

• The FreeBSD foundation has a new blog post about the largest donation they've ever gotten
• From the CEO of WhatsApp comes a whopping one million dollars in a single donation
• It also has some comments from the donor about why they use BSD and why it's important to give back
• Be sure to donate to the foundation of whatever BSD you use when you can - every little bit helps, especially for OpenBSD, NetBSD and DragonFly who don't have huge companies supporting them regularly like FreeBSD does ***

OpenZFS Dev Summit 2014 videos

• Videos from the recent OpenZFS developer summit are being uploaded, with speakers from different represented platforms and companies <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• Matt Ahrens, opening keynote <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• Raphael Carvalho, Platform Overview: ZFS on OSv <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• Brian Behlendorf, Platform Overview: ZFS on Linux <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• Prakash Surya, Platform Overview: illumos <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• Xin Li, Platform Overview: FreeBSD <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• All platforms, Group Q&A Session <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• Dave Pacheco, Manta <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• Saso Kiselkov, Compression <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• George Wilson, Performance <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• Tim Feldman, Host-Aware SMR <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• Pavel Zakharov, Fast File Cloning <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• The audio is pretty poor on all of them unfortunately ***

BSDTalk 248

• Our friend Will Backman is still busy getting BSD interviews as well
• This time he sits down with Matthew Dillon, the lead developer of DragonFly BSD
• We've never had Dillon on the show, so you'll definitely want to give this one a listen
• They mainly discuss all the big changes coming in DragonFly's upcoming 4.0 release ***

MeetBSD 2014 videos

• The presentations from this year's MeetBSD conference are starting to appear online as well <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• Kirk McKusick, A Narrative History of BSD <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• Jordan Hubbard, FreeBSD: The Next 10 Years <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• Brendan Gregg, Performance Analysis <!-- i wonder if freebsdnews will rip our html again and repost it ^{_^} -->
• The slides can be found here ***

Feedback/Questions

• Dominik writes in
• Steven writes in
• Florian writes in
• Richard writes in
• Kevin writes in ***

Mailing List Gold

• Contributing without code
• Compression isn't a CRIME
• Securing web browsers ***

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE is out

• The long awaited, giant release of FreeBSD is now official and ready to be downloaded
• One of the biggest releases in FreeBSD history, with tons of new updates
• Some features include: LDNS/Unbound replacing BIND, Clang by default (no GCC anymore), native Raspberry Pi support and other ARM improvements, bhyve, hyper-v support, AMD KMS, VirtIO, Xen PVHVM in GENERIC, lots of driver updates, ZFS on root in the installer, SMP patches to pf that drastically improve performance, Netmap support, pkgng by default, wireless stack improvements, a new iSCSI stack, FUSE in the base system... the list goes on and on
• Start up your freebsd-update or do a source-based upgrade ***

OpenSSH 6.5 CFT

• Our buddy Damien Miller announced a Call For Testing for OpenSSH 6.5
• Huge, huge release, focused on new features rather than bugfixes (but it includes those too)
• New ciphers, new key formats, new config options, see the mailing list for all the details
• Should be in OpenBSD 5.5 in May, look forward to it - but also help test on other platforms! ***

DIY NAS story, FreeNAS 9.2.1-BETA

• Another new blog post about FreeNAS!
• Instead of updating the older tutorials, the author started fresh and wrote a new one for 2014
• "I did briefly consider suggesting nas4free for the EconoNAS blog, since it’s essentially a fork off the FreeNAS tree but may run better on slower hardware, but ultimately I couldn’t recommend anything other than FreeNAS"
• Really long article with lots of nice details about his setup, why you might want a NAS, etc.
• Speaking of FreeNAS, they released 9.2.1-BETA with lots of bugfixes ***

OpenBSD needed funding for electricity.. and they got it

• Briefly mentioned at the end of last week's show, but has blown up over the internet since
• OpenBSD in the headlines of major tech news sites: slashdot, zdnet, the register, hacker news, reddit, twitter.. thousands of comments
• They needed about $20,000 to cover electric costs for the server rack in Theo's basement
• Lots of positive reaction from the community helping out so far, and it appears they have reached their goal and got $100,000 in donations
• From Bob Beck: "we have in one week gone from being in a dire situation to having a commitment of approximately $100,000 in donations to the foundation"
• This is a shining example of the BSD community coming together, and even the Linux people realizing how critical BSD is to the world at large ***

Interview - Colin Percival - cperciva@freebsd.org / @cperciva

FreeBSD on Amazon EC2, backups with Tarsnap, 10.0-RELEASE, various topics

Tutorial

Bandwidth monitoring and testing

News Roundup

pfSense talk at Tokyo FreeBSD Benkyoukai

• Isaac Levy will be presenting "pfSense Practical Experiences: from home routers, to High-Availability Datacenter Deployments"
• He's also going to be looking for help to translate the pfSense documentation into Japanese
• The event is on February 17, 2014 if you're in the Tokyo area ***

m0n0wall 1.8.1 released

• For those who don't know, m0n0wall is an older BSD-based firewall OS that's mostly focused on embedded applications
• pfSense was forked from it in 2004, and has a lot more active development now
• They switched to FreeBSD 8.4 for this new version
• Full list of updates in the changelog
• This version requires at least 128MB RAM and a disk/CF size of 32MB or more, oh no! ***

Ansible and PF, plus NTP

• Another blog post from our buddy Michael Lucas
• There've been some NTP amplification attacks recently in the news
• The post describes how he configured ntpd on a lot of servers without a lot of work
• He leverages pf and ansible for the configuration
• OpenNTPD is, not surprisingly, unaffected - use it ***

ruBSD videos online

• Just a quick followup from a few weeks ago
• Theo and Henning's talks from ruBSD are now available for download
• There's also a nice interview with Theo ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• 10.0-RC4 images are available
• Wine PBI is now available for 10
• 9.2 systems will now be able to upgrade to version 10 and keep their PBI library ***

Feedback/Questions

• Sha'ul writes in
• Kjell-Aleksander writes in
• Mike writes in
• Charlie writes in (and gets a reply)
• Kevin writes in ***

This episode was brought to you by

Headlines

OpenBSD automatic installation

• A CFT (call for testing) was posted for OpenBSD's new automatic installer process
• Using this new system, you can spin up fully-configured OpenBSD installs very quickly
• It will answer all the questions for you and can put files into place and start services
• Great for large deployments, help test it and report your findings ***

FreeNAS install guide and blog posts

• A multipart series on YouTube about installing FreeNAS
• In part 1, the guy (who is possibly Dracula, with his very Transylvanian accent..) builds his new file server and shows off the hardware
• In part 2, he shows how to install and configure FreeNAS, uses IPMI, sets up his pools
• He pronounces gigabytes as jiggabytes and it's hilarious
• We've also got an unrelated blog post about a very satisfied FreeNAS user who details his setup
• As well as another blog post from our old pal Devin Teske about his recent foray into the FreeNAS development world ***

FreeBSD 10.0-RC5 is out

• Another, unexpected RC is out for 10.0
• Minor fixes included, please help test and report any bugs
• You can update via freebsd-update or from source
• Hopefully this will be the last one before 10.0-RELEASE, which has tons of new features we'll talk about
• It's been tagged -RELEASE in SVN already too! ***

OpenBSD 5.5-beta is out

• Theo updated the branch status to 5.5-beta
• A list of changes
• Help test and report any bugs you find
• Lots of rapid development with signify (which we mentioned last week), the beta includes some "test keys"
• Does that mean it'll be part of the final release? We'll find out in May.. or when we interview Ted (soon) ***

Interview - Neel Natu & Peter Grehan - neel@freebsd.org & grehan@freebsd.org

BHyVe - the BSD hypervisor

Tutorial

Virtualization with bhyve

News Roundup

Hostname canonicalisation in OpenSSH

• Blog post from our friend Damien Miller
• This new feature allows clients to canonicalize unqualified domain names
• SSH will know if you typed "ssh bsdnow" you meant "ssh bsdnow.tv" with new config options
• This will help clean up some ssh configs, especially if you have many hosts
• Should make it into OpenSSH 6.5, which is "due really soon" ***

Dragonfly on a Chromebook

• Some work has been done by Matthew Dillon to get DragonflyBSD working on a Google Chromebook
• These couple of posts detail some of the things he's got working so far
• Changes were needed to the boot process, trackpad and wifi drivers needed updating...
• Also includes a guide written by Dillon on how to get yours working ***

Spider in a box

• "Spiderinabox" is a new OpenBSD-based project
• Using a combination of OpenBSD, Firefox, XQuartz and VirtualBox, it creates a secure browsing experience for OS X
• Firefox runs encapsulated in OpenBSD and doesn't have access to OS X in any way
• The developer is looking for testers on other operating systems! ***

PCBSD weekly digest

• PCBSD 10 has entered into the code freeze phase
• They're focusing on fixing bugs now, rather than adding new features
• The update system got a lot of improvements
• PBI load times reduced by up to 40%! what!!! ***

Feedback/Questions

• Scott writes in
• Chris writes in
• SW writes in
• Ole writes in
• Gertjan writes in ***